“You really have a death wish today, Olivia,” I say between my teeth.

Leah’s mouth is open. “I’m going to destroy you,” she says.

Olivia shrugs. I can’t believe she’s being so calm about this. “You already did. There is nothing more you could do to me. But, I swear to God, if you f**k with Caleb, I’m going to put you in prison for one of your many illegal activities. Then you won’t see your daughter.”

Leah closes her mouth. I open mine. I’m not sure who is more shocked by this fierce defense of me.

“I hate you,” Leah spits. “You’re still the same worthless piece of white trash you always were.”

“I don’t even hate you,” Olivia says. “You’re so pathetic, I can’t. But, don’t think for a minute that I won’t revive your indiscretions.”

“What are you talking about?” Leah’s eyes are shifty. I wonder what Olivia has on her. It must be pretty good if she thought she could get away with two good slaps.

“Christopher,” Olivia says quietly. Leah’s face drains of color. “You’re wondering how I know about that, yes?”

Leah doesn’t say anything, just continues to stare.

“It won’t get you locked up for pharmaceutical fraud, but boy would this be better…”

Seth looks at me and I shrug. The only Christopher I know is a thirty-year-old transgender who works — worked — for Steve.

“What do you want?” Leah says to Olivia.

Olivia swipes the dark hair out of her face and points a finger at me. Actually, she jabs a finger at me.

“You don’t mess with his custody. You mess with his custody; I mess with yours. Understand?”

Leah doesn’t nod, but she doesn’t fight it either.

“You’re a criminal,” Olivia says. “And you’re actually looking kind of chubby.”

With that last bit, she turns on her heels and marches the rest of the way to her car. I don’t know whether to stay and watch Leah’s mortified face, or chase after her. Leah is looking a little chubby.

Seth nods to me, then tugs at my ex-wife’s arm, pulling her toward their car. I watch them go. I watch Olivia go. I stand for thirty minutes after they’ve gone and watch the empty parking lot.

Who the f**k is Christopher?

“Who the f**k is Christopher, Duchess?”

I hear music on the other end of the line. She must turn off the radio because a second later it’s gone.

“You really want to know this?”

“You just made Leah’s face turn as red as her hair. Yeah, I want to know this.”

“All right,” she says. “Hold on, I’m in the drive-thru at Starbucks.”

I wait while she orders. When her voice comes back on the line it sounds professional, like she’s briefing a client.

“Leah was ha**g s*x with her housekeeper’s son.”

“Okay,” I said.

“He was seventeen at the time.”

I let go of the steering wheel to run ten fingers through my hair.

“How do you know?”

We’re heading in two different directions down the 95, but I can feel her smirking. See it.

“Her housekeeper came to see me. Actually, not me — Bernie. Bernie ran a couple billboards last year in Miami, urging sexual harassment victims to come see her. You know, one of those god-awful advertisements where the lawyer is looking all serious and there is a gavel in the far right corner to symbolize your coming justice?”

I know exactly the type.

“Anyway, Christopher’s mother — Shoshi — happened to see it and scheduled an appointment at the office. When she filled out her client information, I noticed that she listed your address as her own. So, I pulled her in before Bernie could get to her. She wanted to talk to someone about her teenage son. She’d sometimes take him with her to work and pay him to do some of the harder things. Apparently Leah was so impressed with his work ethic, she asked Shoshi to bring him on weekends and she paid him to do stuff around the house. After a few months of that, Shoshi found condoms in his wallet and a pair of panties that she said she’d seen a hundred times since she folded them.”

I groan. Olivia hears it and laughs into the phone. “What? Did you think she was normal after that little Who’s my baby daddy? stunt she pulled on you?”

“Okay, so why was this Shoshi character coming to you about sexual harassment? Why not call the police and get Leah jailed for statutory rape?”

“This is where it gets complicated, my friend. Shoshi said her son was denying the whole thing. He refused to get Leah in trouble for sleeping with a minor since he was over eighteen by the time she came to me, but his mother did get him to agree to nail her for sexual harassment.”

“What did you do, Olivia?”

Her eyebrow was up. I knew it was.

“Nothing. Before I could do anything, Shoshi changed her mind. Sounds like Leah paid them off. But I could still get him to testify and she knows it.”

“Ah,” I say. “Well, thank God you’re cunning.”

“Thank God,” she repeats.

“You slapped her, Duchess.”

“Mmmm,” she says. “And it felt so damn good.” We both laugh.

There is a long, awkward silence. Then she says, “Noah and I are divorced.”

The world freezes for one second … two seconds … three seconds …

“Remember that coffee shop? The one we went to after we ran into each other at the grocery store?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“I’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”

When I walk into the coffee shop, she’s already there. She’s sitting at the same table we sat at years earlier. In front of her are two cups.

“I got you a tea,” she says when I sit. I grin at the irony. This time it’s me asking about her breakup.

“So, what happened?”

She tucks the hair that has fallen into her face behind her ears and looks at me sadly.

“I got pregnant.”

I try to pretend that I’m unfazed by this little piece of news, but I can feel the awkwardness all over my face. I wait for her to go on.

“I lost it.”

Agh! So much pain in her face. Our hands are both resting on the table, so close, that I reach a finger out and stroke her pinkie with it.

“He agreed to have a baby with me, but when I lost it, he looked so relieved. Then-” she pauses to hide her watery eyes and take a sip of coffee, “-then he said maybe it was for the best.”

I flinch.

“We made it a few more months after that, then I asked him to leave.”

“Why?”

“He wanted to go back to life as he knew it. He was happy and laughing. In his mind, we tried and it wasn’t meant to be. I couldn’t go back after that. It was my second miscarriage.” She looks up at me and I nod.

“Whoever thought the cold, heartless Olivia Kaspen would want to have children?” She smiles bitterly.

“I knew you would,” I say. “It was just a matter of time and healing.”

We finish our drinks in silence. When we stand up, I stop a few feet away from the trashcan with my coffee cup in my hand.

“Olivia?”

“Yeah?”

“If I make this shot, will you go out with me?” I hold my cup like it’s a basketball and look from her to the trashcan.

“Yeah,” she says, smiling. “Yeah, I will.”

I make the shot.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

This is the start of our life. This is our choice. We barely have our shit together. I terminated my contract in London, moved home and sold my condo. She sold hers too, and we moved into an apartment near both of our jobs. It’s not even a nice apartment — there is too much linoleum and our neighbors fight constantly. But, we don’t care. We just wanted to ditch the past and be together. We’ll figure it out. Might take some time. We don’t have a plan yet, we don’t even have furniture, but we are both okay with the surrender. We have little fights all the time. She hates that I don’t throw away my trash — water bottles, cookie bags, candy wrappers. She finds them all over the apartment and makes a big show of crinkling them up and throwing them in the trash. I hate the way she soaks the bathroom floor. The woman doesn’t dry herself. Goddamn if it’s nice to look at her soaking body as she walks from the bathroom to the bedroom, but use a f**king towel already. She always makes the bed. I always do the dishes. She drinks milk straight from the carton and that kind of pisses me off, but then she reminds me that she has to live with my snoring and I call it even. But, holy hell is she fun. How did I not know that we could laugh this much? Or sit in absolute silence and listen to music together? How did I live without this for so long? I watch her sit on one of our two chairs, one from her house, one from mine — her fingers clipping lightly across her keyboard. It still feels like I’m dreaming when I come home to her every night. I love this dream!

I lean over her neck as she works and kiss her on her sweet spot. She shivers. “Stop it, I’m trying to work.”

“I don’t really care, Duchess…”

I kiss her again, my hand sliding down the front of her shirt. Her breath catches. I can’t see her face, but I know her eyes are closed. I step around the front of her chair and I extend my hand to her. She looks at it for a long moment. The longest moment. Without looking away from me, she sets her computer down and stands up. We are still getting to know each other sexually. She’s a little timid, and I’m afraid of being too aggressive and chasing her away. But, here we are. I struck my match, she poured out her gasoline. We burn now. All the time.

I lead her to my bed, stopping at the foot to pull her against me. I kiss her for a long time. I kiss her until she’s leaning into me so much I have to hold her up.

“Do I make you feel weak?” I say this against her mouth.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“You take away my control.”

I unzip the back of her dress and slip the sleeves from her shoulders. Every single sexual encounter with Olivia is a balancing act; part seduction, part psychoanalysis. I have to wrestle with her demons to get her legs to open. I love it and I hate it.

“Why do you always need to have control?”

“So, I don’t get hurt.”

I don’t make a big deal of anything she’s saying. I work at taking off her clothes. When I reach her bra, I pull down the cups instead of taking it off completely. I hold one of her br**sts with one hand. My other arm is wrapped around her waist so she can’t get away. Not that she would try. I think by now, I have her.

“Do you like feeling weak?”

If I look over her shoulder, I can see the entire rear of her in my dresser mirror. She is wearing a white lace panty.

I eye her legs as I wait for her answer. My heart is pounding; the rest of me is aching. I already know her answer. I know she likes to feel weak. It is a thrill for her to yield, though it costs her something every time she does. I want to eliminate the emotional fear and get her to the point where she just enjoys it.

“Yes.”

“I won’t leave you,” I say. “I won’t ever love another woman.”

I let go of her breast and let my hand trail between her legs. Pulling the material aside, I touch her. I’ve learned that leaving her underwear on until right before I take her helps the process. You have to strip this woman’s defenses away slowly.

She falls back on the bed, and I slide on top of her. She unclasps her own bra and throws it to her left.

“Wanna try something new?”

She nods.

I make her straddle me, and then turn her around so she’s facing away. She can see herself in the mirror this way. I’m curious to see if she’ll watch.

She leans forward, putting her hands flat on the bed between my knees, and begins to roll her h*ps in a circular movement. It’s times like these that I am unsure of who is really made weak by whom. This woman was made for sex. She’s so inhibited, but when she lets go, I am given the most sensual ride of my life. Both of her hands are flat on my chest. She rocks back and forth as she rides me. She throws her head back and her hair is so long it sweeps my knees. I have never seen anything more erotic and beautiful in my life. When her head rolls forward, her hair cascades into her face. I wrap it around my hand and pull her to kiss me. While I’m playing with her tongue, I flip her over. She protests and I nip her on the shoulder, which seems to shut her up. I am behind her and I have her on her knees, but instead of bending her over, I run my hands down her arms and grab her wrists, guiding her hands to the frame of the bed so she’s half upright.

I swipe her hair over one of her shoulders, kiss her neck and place my hands on her hips. I lean forward to speak into her ear.

“Hold on tight.”

“You can’t deny we do that right.”

She smiles up at me, her eyes soft and hazy. The only time Olivia’s eyes are not alert and pointedly cold are when she’s pinned beneath me — or when she’s recovering from being pinned beneath me. I’ve trained her to say I love you when she orgasms. If she doesn’t say I love you, she doesn’t get an orgasm — she learned that the hard way. It’s payback for all the years she wouldn’t tell me. Afterward, it takes her at least an hour to return to her normal spitfire mode. But, for an hour after sex I have her soft and submissive. I like to call it the ‘temporary taming of the shrew.’ I live for those hours, where’s she looking up at me like I’m the man. Sometimes, I can even get her to say it.